Trump’s Populism Is Not Just a Western Phenomenon

Donald Trump and the British politician Nigel Farage at a Trump rally in Mississippi, in August.

PHOTOGRAPH BY DAMON WINTER / THE NEW YORK TIMES / REDUX

Last week, a photograph was taken of Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, the far-right English politician who helped steer his country toward Brexit, standing in a golden elevator at Trump Tower, their arms around each other. Both men have accented their pale complexions with artificial tans, and both are exuberant: Trump’s expression is slightly sheepish, his features happy and pinched, while Farage’s face is stretched into a wild jack-o’-lantern grin. “Huh?” Trump said in June, when a reporter asked him about the impending Brexit vote. By August, Farage was serving as a warmup act for Trump in Jackson, Mississippi. This seemed strange and disturbing—since when had Mississippi conservatives required a foreign exhorter?—but you could detect a broader utility in the alliance. Farage’s presence in Jackson suggested that Trump’s voters were engaged in a rebellion that was big enough to encompass the West; it assured them that their grievance had heft, and a context.

In the final months of the Presidential campaign, the talk about foreign inflections was all about Russia. In August, journalists probed the connections between Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, and the pro-Russia politicians he had worked for in Ukraine. As Election Day neared, there was a flurry of heated, speculative reporting about the possibility that Trump was an asset of Russian intelligence. “No puppet,” Trump insisted during the final Presidential debate, when Hillary Clinton claimed that he was, or would be, one for Vladimir Putin.

The day before the debate, the Obama Administration had formally accused Russia of hacking e-mail accounts in an attempt to interfere in the election. But there is a connection between Putin and Trump that is deeper, in which Putin is not the cause but a symptom, just as the President-elect is. Since the Arab Spring, nationalism and authoritarianism have been on the rise in both the largest and the freest countries, some of which have voted for more-autocratic leaders, and also in less democratic countries, where strongmen have strengthened their grips: in Egypt, the United Kingdom, Russia, India, Turkey, the Philippines, and China. (See Adrian Chen’s profile of the President of the Philippines, Rodrigo Duterte, in this week’s magazine.) In France and Germany, the political center is still in power, but nationalist populism is on the march.

Dark news comes this week from the largest of those nations. James Fallows, writing in the December issue of The Atlantic, has an account of the Chinese crackdown on free expression, which he dates to 2012. It has become surpassingly difficult for Chinese people to get around the nation’s Great Firewall, and to reach foreign sources of news. Fallows writes, “Every week or two the Chinese press carries warnings, more and more explicit, by President Xi Jinping and his colleagues that dissent is not permissible and the party’s interests come first.” He notes that “churches have been bulldozed across the country” and that many of the country’s public-interest and human-rights lawyers, its feminists and environmentalists, are now in jail. According to the Wall Street Journal, a new national ad campaign warns people about foreign agents, and at least one school has introduced a weekly play-acting game called Spot the Spy.

There is no cold war right now—no civilizational conflict that might pressure each of these nations toward harder rule—even if the threat of terrorism, in many of these cases, is something between a pretext and a cause. Some of these rising nationalist movements, like Brexit and Trumpism, are in league with one another, if only loosely. Others, like the mirroring, increasingly authoritarian regimes in China and the Philippines, are opposed to one another. Everyone’s position on Russia seems to be in flux. In the week since Trump’s victory, the main argument in the United States has been whether the President-elect owes his triumph mostly to his supporters’ racism or their economic anxiety. Given the Trump movement’s constant antagonism of minority groups, those arguing for racism have made a clearer case. But the strength of racial hatred doesn’t exclude the presence of many other factors—economic stratification; the plasticity of fact on social media; the threat of terror; the general, abstracted anxiety over the future of the planet—that may have mattered, too, and whose influence extends far away.

When Farage and the far-right Dutch politician Geert Wilders were parading through the Republican National Convention in Cleveland this summer, it seemed easy enough to pinpoint what was happening: Western societies were experiencing a populist, racist reaction to the fact that they had become both more pluralistic and more segmented by education. But to see the West as subject to special forces is to accept the nationalists’ ways of thinking. That the same illiberalism is rising in Xi’s China, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, in Sisi’s Egypt, in Duterte’s Philippines makes you suspect that these are not surface currents but deeper forces, not so specific to the West.

It made me look differently, at least, at that photograph of Trump and Farage. Neither looks to me like a puppet or a mastermind. Maybe it’s the casino sheen of the elevator door, but they look instead like happy gamblers, on a winning streak and not inclined to question, or try to control, the source of their great luck.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells began contributing to The New Yorker in 2006, and joined the magazine as a staff writer in 2015. He writes mainly about American politics and society.